The Burns Bannion books are the closest thing I have to a guilty pleasure. They aren't great examples of crime fiction and they are cringe-worthy toward women by todays standards but they are a lot of fun to read. They are unabashedly men's adventure thrillers from a different time and I look at them in that context and just go with the flow of sex and over-the-top karate action and enjoy them immensely. Besides, Burnsie and I go back around 50 years as I relate in my review of Kill Me in Tokyo.
This second outing for Bannion picks up picks up right after the events in Kill Me in Tokyo. Inspector Ezawa of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police gives Burns an ultimatum, get a permanent place to live, get registered with the local ward office, and get enrolled in university or get out of Japan. Bannion very much does not want to leave Japan:
I had my own good reasons for wanting to stay on in Japan—thousands of them, and cute ones, tripping up and down the Ginza any time of day—and I wanted to make a more intensive study of Karate, that deadly art which had also proved a lively and handy one during my career as a private eye.
One of the "cute ones" Bannion is pursuing mentions Harry's Bar before giving him the slip. Hoping for a reunion, Bannion heads to Harry's Bar where indeed he finds Tamiko or Tami as she likes to be called. Apparently she "belongs" to a gangster named Kindo which promises to complicate Bannion's plans for Tami. This sets into motion one of the subplots, namely rescuing Tami from the clutches of Kindo. Burns also meets a Marine, Bill Barkentine, a former POW who was captured by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1942 when they attacked a train in China on which Barkentine was guarding a shipment.
Barkentine offers Bannion a much needed infusion of cash to find the shipment he was guarding, the bones of the Peking Man. Barkentine figures they are worth a fortune. By coincidence (Tami's grandfather is a renowned archeologist, anthropologist, and geologist) and research, Bannion is on the trail of the missing bones and having to deal with gangsters, their own karate men, and cultists who seem to have something to do with the bones, while hoping his karate skills will keep him alive.
I've been thinking about why the Burns Bannion books appeal to me. Certainly part of it has to do with me having encountered them for the first time as a young soldier in an Asian country. Reading them again after all these years I see an author who had a good time writing a particular type of book — male oriented adventure. Along the way he has his Bannion poking fun at the way he does and doesn't fit the role of hardboiled detective à la Philip Marlowe. While Bannion is an unrepentant horndog the women are no pushovers. For example:
Brother you sure got no polite custom, American man supposed to have some polite custom to woman!...I began the usual Bannion approach. Toni-chan said sharply "Hey you can fool around second floor, but nobody home downstair!"
And when Bannion finally does score, after some bodily explorations there is a fade to black leavig what happened to the reader's imagination, no explicit sex.
Norman also writes some first rate karate fights. In fact, Bannion's musing about karate, practicing karate, using his karate in fights is actually a large part of the books.
So I guess we'll see if the Burns Bannion books continue to hold the same appeal for me and for now I can hardly wait for the next one.
Keywords: private detectives, Japan, hardboiled detectives,, cults, action adventure, thrillers
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